Please see my new post at Better Bibles Blog for an interesting view from a non-Christian journalist on a Bible translation controversy.

Iyov reproduces an article from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz which reports that Israel’s Education Ministry has decided to ban versions of the Bible (presumably meaning only what we Christians call the Old Testament) in modern Hebrew. A government official has said:

The idea of translating the Bible into simple contemporary language is ‘scandalous’.

I’m not quite sure what the scope of the ban is to be, perhaps only on the use of these versions in state school classrooms – which needs to be put in the perspective that use of any kind of Bible in US state school classrooms is effectively banned.

Here I could get into questions of inappropriate intrusion of the state into religious matters, but then I realise that Israel is something of a special case in such matters. Instead I would like to look at the implications for translation.

John Hobbins has brought out these implications in his wonderful spoof on the article, in which he transculturares it to America. Of course this spoof doesn’t quite fit the American scene. But it does remind us of the real issue, that whereas for decades there have been good translations of the whole Bible into modern English, there are still national languages into which there is no easily understood translation, and that modern Hebrew is one of them.

Hebrew as spoken in Israel today is not the same language as the Hebrew of the Bible. There is probably at least as much difference between biblical and modern Hebrew as between the English of Shakespeare and that of today. (Iyov and John Hobbins, would you agree?) There are many obscurities in the text which even scholars don’t understand with any certainty, which means that ordinary Israelis don’t have a chance. And even when they think they understand the original text, they can completely misunderstand it if they read it as if it was in their contemporary language.

For example, a few years ago I got into discussion on an Internet forum with a scholarly modern Hebrew reader who insisted that God’s words in Exodus 3:14 mean “I will be what I will be”. And indeed that is what ‘ehyeh ‘asher ‘ehyeh means in modern Hebrew, in which the verb ‘ehyeh is in the future tense. But God was not speaking modern Hebrew, he was speaking (or at least his words were recorded in) an ancient form in which this verb form is timeless and continuous, best translated “I am” on the understanding that that also means “I always have been and always will be”. The educated person I was discussing this with thought she understood the Hebrew Bible, but she didn’t.

So, despite Keith’s comment, there is no fundamental distinction between the situation in Hebrew and in English. Just as today’s English readers don’t understand the King James Version and so there is a need for the good translations which exist into modern English (I don’t want to get sidetracked here into which of them is best), in the same way modern Hebrew readers don’t understand the original Hebrew Bible and so there is a need for a good translation into modern Hebrew. I don’t know if the versions which are now being banned are in fact good translations, but I hope that they are and that the current controversy serves to increase rather than reduce their circulation.

In the late 19th and early 20th century there was a similar controversy over translation of the New Testament into modern Greek. (Sadly the only reference to this which I can find with Google is from a Jehovah’s Witnesses site.) In 1901 there was rioting in Athens about this, but by 1924 the need for a modern translation was recognised even by the religious authorities. I hope that similarly over time the people, government and religious leaders of Israel will come to recognise the need for a modern Hebrew Bible, and that as a result the word of God will be much more widely read in the land where it was written down.

I must say I am somewhat confused about what Karen Jobes has been writing and saying.

A few days ago I reported on a paper “Bible Translation as Bilingual Quotation” which, according to the Zondervan blog, she presented “at the Fall 2007 Evangelical Theological Society Annual Meeting”. I wrote about this paper that I expected it to interact with Relevance Theory as presented by Ernst-August Gutt, but it did not.

Just now I have received a link to a blog post by “Chaka”, a 26-year-old man who is apparently linked with one of Zondervan’s rivals as a Bible publisher, Tyndale. In this post “Chaka” writes a review of an article by the same Karen Jobes, published in the same quarter of the same year in the journal of the same Evangelical Theological Society (in fact Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50.4 (December 2007) 773-797). But it turns out that this is a different article with a different title, “Relevance Theory and the Translation of Scripture”. And, although there is some overlap in the subject matter in that both papers address the issue of verbosity in Bible translations, the paper “Chaka” refers to does in fact interact with Relevance Theory as presented by Ernst-August Gutt. (In fact “Chaka” also links to the Zondervan blog post referring to the first paper.)

But there is a further puzzle in that the verbosity statistics in the two papers, or two versions of the same paper, are inconsistent. For example, according to the paper linked to by Zondervan, NIV is 18.56% more verbose than the original Hebrew and Greek, NRSV is 21.72% more verbose, and ESV is 23.67% more verbose. But according to the figures Chaka quotes from the other paper, NIV is 33.18% more verbose than the original, ESV is 38.93% more verbose, and NRSV is an astonishing 64.43% more verbose.

So what is happening here? What is the relationship between these two papers? It is hard for me to tell without seeing the latter. But perhaps there is a need here to exercise the scholarly disciplines of source and redaction criticism.